There’s been so many late night improv shows in Auckland 0ver the decades and being an inner city denizen I’ve managed to catch most of them. I’ll see your Improv Bandits and raise you Michael Hurst’s & Oliver Driver’s Watershed Theatre improv, so my cynical and blackened splinter of a heart demands much to giggle but Snort is some of the best I’ve seen.

It’s a dazzle of gay anthems, clever staging, great actors and soul. The juxtaposition of queer culture and outback Australia is still powerful and works brilliantly on stage. The performances are wonderful, the singing and dancing top notch and the speed with which they must be changing costumes back stage is close to a magic act in itself.

Mahuika step onstage as a fledgling theatre company and take their first bow to rapturous applause from a delighted audience. It’s 2016 and homelessness in New Zealand sits at record levels. An approximation puts the total of New Zealanders on the street at 40, 000.* It is late winter, and we’ve just hit hailstorm season, but that’s not the play that’s the real world.

The onus is on the company to uphold more delight, more suspense, and even more clever theatrical motif and surprise for its at home audiences, while at the same time, growing beyond international acclaim to international expansion.

Komako and Whetu Silver have brought together a show for Matariki that teaches in a beautiful and homely way. (Suitable for all ages with some faint but resonant coming of age themes, and all levels of Reo Maori too).

The premise of the show is straight forward enough, a girl waits in a karaoke bar for her blind date to arrive. That blind date is a different person every night and the actress has no idea who it will be before they walk in. There is no script, there are no rehearsals, just excellent performers being sent the occasional direction via text.

What an absolutely stunning show. I had to ask twice to check I’d heard right that this is the first staged production for Samuel Christopher, who also played a raw, real, but vulnerable, Wolf Royal, home from London for his mother’s funeral. It was a punchy, in-your-face, look through the windows into the family living […]